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'Prometheus' Screenwriter: Humans Will Never Reach Another Star, And Other Sobering Views On The Future

If you’ve seen the trailer for “Prometheus,” the dark, hotly-anticipated prequel to Ridley Scott’s “Alien” franchise, you probably got a healthy dose of some of the best that sci-fi filmmaking can offer: shrieking astronauts in spherical-glass helmets, ships that travel at light-speed to craggy, blue-tinted planets and spinning holographic star charts.

All the stuff that tickles our imagination and makes us ponder humanity’s space-faring future. It may be a surprise then, that the man who wrote the original screenplay for “Prometheus” doesn’t see our reality planning out that way, rather neatly knocking on the head the notion that much of what we see and read in science fiction, is a hoped-for precursor to real technology.

Jon Spaihts, known as the “go-to guy” for Hollywood sci-fi screenplays, says that for decades, science-fiction writers have overestimated our civilization’s future technological progression; it makes him a story teller by trade, but a pragmatist at heart.

“Science fiction has taught us to see the universe as vastly smaller and less energetic than it is,” Spaihts said during a phone interview on Monday. “Space travel involves such mind-boggling distances and high energies that I think most people have no idea how difficult it is.” He paused for a moment. “My personal belief is that as much as I love science fiction, human beings will never reach another star.”

The reason for this is simple. Traveling at light speed, which is something most space-faring science fiction tales suppose, is impossible. It’s “not just something we don’t have a theoretical underpinning for, but theoretically prohibited by our present understanding of the universe,” Spaihts says. Even at rapid speeds, a journey to another star a would take generations, and require rockets to expend a tremendous amount of energy, “throwing something in the other direction – rocket exhaust.” The farther you go the more propellant you have to carry. “The energy you spend getting out on that fantastic clip, you have to spend that at either end stopping.”

All very rational. Fortunately, Spaihts can reconcile the logical reality of our future with his story-telling, by remembering where the mythology of space exploration comes from: a “nautical model,” and one that sees innovation constantly speeding up. “It’s a recapitulation of our story of the last generations as we have, as a species, expanded our understanding by orders of magnitude every century, and at an accelerating rate,” says Spaihts.

It is easy to expect that this “ramp” will continue ever upwards and that the expansion of human power and ingenuity will continue to ever-dazzling heights. How could that not take us to over planets? Spaihts points out we already see limits to some of these “ramps” on earth — to fossil fuels, to Moore’s Law, and to the speed at which one can travel through space. “These limits are non-negotiable,” he says. We may sometimes find alternatives, in making micro-processors cheaper and more energy efficient, for instance. “But light speed is what it is.”

A still from "Prometheus," via 20th Century Fox

We’ve seen it all before, how futurists and other science fiction writers got it wrong. Futurists of the 1950s all seemed to be believe that by the year 2000, we would be flying around in cars and living on moon bases. And yet in these optimistic visions of space-faring civilizations, Spaihts notes, people still had secretaries typing up their messages.

“They utterly failed to see a different ramp that wasn’t yet visible to them, which was the development of information process and networking, computers and the Internet. Artificial intelligence.”

Disappointing as it is to accept we may never explore other stars in the Milky Way galaxy, there may similarly be other “ramps,” or ground-breaking technological trends that we don’t yet see. Spaihts believes we can look forward to a growth in artificial intelligence to help us process our real-time society’s glut of data. He calls this the development of a “meaningful digital agent,” or a software entity that we can converse with, and ask to perform tasks and retrieve information from the Internet’s vast databases, then return that data in a conversational way.

The idea of androids who can walk around like people is beside the point — those will be closer to “toys,” he says. More fundamental will be the ability to talk to machines, and solve today’s massive input-output problem on a world wide web that is still painstaking and time-consuming to re-arrange.

“It will be like having an angel on your shoulder who can answer your questions and transform the accessibility of data,” says Spaihts. “When that becomes meaningfully possible, it will change the fundamental face of society in ways we cannot predict now.”

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The screenwriter apparently does not quite understand how the speed of light works. The speed of light is not a speed limit. It is instead a constant that applies in every reference frame. This means that no matter whether you are moving or standing still, from your perspective a photon will always have the same measurable speed in a vacuum. For this rule to hold true, distance and time appear to change as one begins to approach relativistic speeds (i.e. speeds near to that of light from the perspective of an outside observer). Thus from your perspective, if you accelerate to speeds begining to closely approach that of light, the distance between you and the locations to which you are traveling will appear to shrink. From the perspective of an outside observer, your clocks will begin to slow down and your movements within your frame of reference will begin to slow.

For example, in terms of theoretically traveling to a star located 100 light years away, from the perspective of individuals on earth, it will necessarily take at least 100 years for a space ship (traveling close to the speed of light) to reach the star. However, from the perspective of the astronaut, the journey could occur much more quickly, because the apparent distance to the star will begin to shrink as the speed of the astronaut gets closer and closer to the speed of light from the perspective of the outside observer.

If you are in some sort of futuristic space ship far beyond our current

Although I agree with many of his non-space travel positions, I find it shocking that a sci-fi writer immersed in the space travel science is apparently ignorant of what’s possible in this realm.

As @trianglelawdevil explains, relativity means that onboard subject time is shorter than that of Earth. For example, a trip to a star about 32,000 light years away in a ship that maintains a comfortable 1g acceleration for half of the trip (and 1g deceleration for the other half) yeilds an onboard subject time of about 20 years. Earthlings must wait 32,000 years, NOT the ship inhabitants.

Oh, but think constant 1g acceleration is ridiculous? Wrong, there are decades-old theoretical designs (the Bussard ramjet) that might do it.

On the smaller/shorter scale, the closest stars are about 4 light years away. Even at 40% the speed of light, it’s a potentially doable trip within everyone’s lifetime.

Oh, think 40% the speed of light is ridiculous for the near future? Wrong, there are decades-old designs *within our technological ability* that might do it. It’s called nuclear pulse propulsion, and the only reason we can’t build it is because international law and good sense currently prevent launching nuclear material into space.

The point is, you have to stretch the imagination a little when it comes to practical space flight, but there are designs within the limits of know physics that make long distance space travel possible, potentially within our lifetimes (if we had the moxy or the extreme motivation).

Thank you. For some corrections, I meant to say “subjective” instead of “subject.” Also, off the top of my head, 40% the speed of light might be optimistic for nuclear pulse propulsion, but even at 10%, the trip is doable within the lifetime of the occupant and those on Earth for near stars. The bigger problem is storing enough supplies to keep a person alive the entire time, and for that we look must look to genetic engineering and biological enhancement, also probably practical to achieve within our lifetimes. Of course, we would probably send unmanned vessels first… Boring!

I believe it is a bold statement to say the human kind will never reach another star. Even if there are any wormholes, no warp velocity out there capable of doing the trick of speeding close or beyond the speed of light, human beings could reach another star in the future. Maybe it won’t be the same people that left planet Earth, but their descendants, born on the ship, who will reach another system. The technology is going in that direction; potentially habitable planets are being searched right now, and nuclear power, solar sails or even antimatter (or a combination of these) can be used as fuel.

Let’s see (and hope). Spaiht’s point is that even with things like antimatter or nuclear power being available, speed-of-light travel is “theoretically” impossible, and traveling great distances at great speed would need too much propellant to be viable. But who knows, really. Theories change, don’t they?

God, I hope so. That made for monumentally depressing reading! I would have thought that a screenwriter, whose job description is basically ‘professional fantasist’ would have a touch more imagination. No wonder Scott had to bring in a second writer to punch up the script…

Spaiths has a point when he says many futurists of the past have failed to anticipate technologies we are using right now, like networking. However, I believe he is thinking as a contemporary man. He is just looking into a few hundreds years into the future maybe. But who knows if we’ll be really interested in networking thousands or tens of thousands of years from now. And who knows where evolution will take us. I don’t think it is necessary to travel at the speed of light to reach another star. Maybe not every man will be willing to take the chance and to sacrifice himself in order to spread the seed of the human kind throughout the cosmos (I mean sacrificing a “normal” life,or just getting to see the place where he is going, or even knowing that he will succeed or not). But, if we do not destroy ourselves before we get to that stage of technological stage, I think that is where we are heading. The stars have fascinated us since ancient times and, on the other hand, in the future looking for a second home may be a matter of life and death for the species.

Even more optimism here. The speed of light is limit for anything with mass. When there is no mass, there is no such limit. The warping of space for example may enable faster than light travel. In fact, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre has already discovered equations that are consistent with general relativity that describe such travel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive. The problem may be of the engineering variety, but “warp speed” does not seem to be prevented by established, currently understood and accepted physics.

Let us remember the immortal words of Arthur C. Clarke: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

If humanity does not reach another star, then our species will die. It’s that simple. Our sun will die, and it will take the entire solar system with it. It is possible that our species (or whatever we evolve into) will get wiped out ahead of time by disease or some form of self annihilation. The only, and I mean the ONLY way to guarantee the survival of the species is to expand outward into the galaxy. It is not an option to stay on Earth.

Mathieu David – “No wonder Scott had to bring in a second writer to punch up the script.” Ouch! I rather like Spaiht’s pragmatic views, and almost get the sense they act as a a counterbalance to let his imagination go wherever it likes when he writes a script. Also, bear in mind that Spaiht is a relatively unproduced screenwriter, and that Scott may just as easily have brought on a marquee writer like Damon Lindelof to appease Hollywood money.